Post War and Contemporary Art featuring A Vision in Color: A Curated Session by Emily Friedman

Provenance:

Nees Mofes Gallery, Athens, Greece

The Lydia Winston Malbin Collection, acquired at the Venice Biennale in 1960

Gifted by the above within the family in 1964

Thence by descent to present owner

Exhibited:

Venice, Italy, 30th Venice Biennale, June 18-October 16, 1960 via Nees Morfes Gallery, Athens, Greece

Lydia Winston Malbin (1897-1989)  

The present work comes from the highly esteemed collection of Lydia Winston Malbin (1897-1989), a visionary collector best known for her engagement with the Italian Futurists. Her holdings, however, extended far beyond a single movement, encompassing artists whose practices reshaped modernism across the Atlantic. Born in 1897 to the famed industrial architect Albert Kahn and Ernestine Kahn, Winston Malbin inherited a natural sensibility for the arts. Based for much of her life near Detroit, Michigan, she built one of the most significant private collections of European modern art in the mid-twentieth century and was a driving force behind introducing these movements to the upper Midwest. 

What distinguished Lydia Winston Malbin was not only her discerning eye, but her commitment to the artists themselves. She cultivated lasting relationships with many of them and worked tirelessly to bring their work to broader public attention. At a time when abstraction remained contentious, she co-organized—with Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Guggenheim Museum)—Detroit’s first exhibition of abstract art in the early 1940s. Through decades of travel, study, and meticulous correspondence, she and her husband Harry Winston traced the currents of modernism across Europe, forging ties with artists and their surviving family members. Her friendships extended beyond the studio as well, encompassing art world luminaries like Alfred Barr, Rose Fried, Peggy Guggenheim, and Alfred Stieglitz—establishing her as a key figure in the global modernist network. 

After the death of her husband in 1965, Lydia married Dr. Barnett Malbin in 1966. The Malbins decided to move to an apartment in Manhattan. LWM loved New York City, the center of art activity, and had always wanted to live there. (The Lydia Winston Malbin Papers, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) 

Lydia Winston Malbin died in New York City in 1989 at the age of 91, leaving an indelible mark on the art world and setting a lasting standard for what it means to collect with purpose and conviction.